Quantifying Antitrust Regimes

Abstract

This paper introduces means of quantifying global trend of proliferation in antitrust laws, and introduces measures to assess the presence of such laws across a large set of countries. In particular, the Antitrust Law Index maps the presence of "laws on the book" into a numerical measure of competition regimes by assigning binomial scores for the presence of particular laws in a jurisdiction, and then summing the individual components to yield a total score. The countries with the highest index values do not necessarily represent the strongest antitrust laws. The results do suggest that the impetus for adopting antitrust laws appears related to the imposed guidelines of supranational bodies, in particular the requirements of the European Union.